


Like Tiger Stripes

by Dorian



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 12:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12321096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorian/pseuds/Dorian
Summary: He watches as the image of Betty reflected in the mirror puts on red lipstick. In the softly lit room, the color glows like neon lights shining off wet pavement.





	Like Tiger Stripes

Jughead would like to believe that he doesn’t have a particular reason for leaving his phone beside him on Archie’s bed as he reworks a paragraph on the role of the Blossom legacy in everyone’s sticky-sweet childhood memories—that he’s not aware of the time and just how long cheer practice runs on Tuesdays. 

He’d like to, but he has never been much for lying to himself. 

So when the text notifications chime in a _one-two-three_ burst at 4:15, he feels absurd staring at words that have abstracted out into strings of letters. He drums on the keys, but light enough that the keystrokes don’t register, dragging out a full minute. 

What exactly is he trying to prove here?

He turns his phone over and reads Betty’s texts. 

_Almost home._

_Come over?_

_Homework date_

He sends back a quick reply ( _Mmm sexy_ ) and packs up his laptop.

 

Betty is still unbuttoning her gray peacoat as she opens the door at his knock. None of the lights are on downstairs and the house is quiet as he steps inside. 

After weeks of being invited in the front door of the Coopers’ big white house and up the carpeted stairs, maybe the thrill of being in Betty’s pale pink bedroom should be wearing off. But an echo of the same fluttery swoop rolls through him as when she first slid open her window with a puzzled smile, fingertips spread wide against the glass pane.

Jughead leaves the door ajar like usual. 

(He has a usual amount that he leaves her bedroom door open.)

Betty glances around and sighs. Her shoulders tense upward.

“Hey.” He runs his hand down her arm. “What is it?”

She turns, tugging at the sleeves of her cardigan. “My mom cleaned my room. Again.” 

He raises his eyebrows and waits for the twist. 

“I keep on asking her not to, Jug.” Betty wraps her arms around herself, over her stomach. “She searches through everything, looking for I don’t even know what—for _inappropriate_ things. And I think she uses cleaning as an excuse to read my diary.”

Betty gives an off-kilter _what-you-gonna-do_ shrug. And, really, what can any of them do about their parents?

“Too bad we can’t average out your mom and my dad.” This isn’t the right thing to say, but Betty huffs out a breath that resembles laughter. 

“Would it be crazy to start a—I don’t know. A decoy diary?”

He pitches his voice up a little. “Dear Diary. Nothing at all inappropriate happened today.”

“Juggie.” But Betty is smiling as she grabs his hand and walks backwards, so he keeps on going.

“Dear Diary. Today I was in all respects a model Cooper. Still nothing inappropriate to report.”

That gets another huff of not-quite-laughter.

She sits on the bed and scoots across to make room, twisting to sit up against what he can’t help but think of as her Numerous Upper-Middle Class Decorative Pillows. 

Betty pats the bedspread next to her and glances down at his shoes with a tilt of her head.

He’s sat on her bed before, so the rush that hits him—half-queasy, half-pleasant—as he kicks off his shoes without bothering with the laces is ridiculous. 

(He has even kissed her on this bed before as she leaned in close while his fingertips slid from her knee on up—until the door flew open and he found out how fast he could get a foot of space between them.)

All that’s happening here is homework though. 

(Probably.)

And at least the Upper-Middle Class Decorative Pillows are more comfortable to lean against than they look. 

Betty has a pre-calculus book already open on her crossed legs. She grabs a notebook and flips to one of the bright little sticky-note tabs she uses to mark her place before nudging her backpack further down the bed with the ball of her foot.

Her feet are bare and tiny and her toenails are painted traffic cone orange.

Jughead is ahead in all his reading and behind in half his assignments, but he’d rather read than answer barely warmed over prompts for American Government or face anything from English that starts off by calling itself, without irony, a Self-Guided Reflection Exercise. 

As he debates with himself—biology or history—Betty starts penciling out neat fast lines of equations punctuated by the emphatic boxes she draws around her final answers. 

Jughead glances at her frown of concentration before opening his biology textbook to a labeled illustration of a cell’s interior structure, which looks primitive and squiggly like a deep sea creature. But instead of absorbing how life proceeds on a cellular level, he finds himself constructing fragmentary descriptions. 

The arcs and whorls of her ear with the tiny gold, silver and bronze studs lined up in the three piercings at her lobe—

The shadow that gathers behind the turn of her jaw—

The geometry of her long neck, bowed forward—

How the perpetual tension of her good posture emphasizes the width of her shoulders that somehow look fragile and strong all at once.

A slant of winter sunlight shifts over the floor and fades. Betty slides off the bed to flip on more lights. She plugs in the white Christmas lights she keeps up year-round and then turns on a lamp, rose-colored and shell-like, next to angled mirrors that are part of what he thinks is called a vanity, though that seems like a rather judgmental name for a piece of furniture.

Jughead is watching the familiar bounce and swing of her ponytail, which is why he notices the way she goes still, hand partway dropped from twisting on the lamp. The freeze-frame pause drags out until, with a distorted slowness, she picks up a tube of lipstick that’s been left upright and dead-center on the otherwise clear surface. 

Betty stares down at the lipstick in her hand and then at herself in one of the angled mirrors. She squares her shoulders and pulls the top off. 

He watches as the image of Betty reflected in the mirror puts on red lipstick. In the softly lit room, the color glows like neon lights shining off wet pavement. 

Betty caps the tube with a click and turns, crossing the room. She already has one knee on the bed, leaning in, before the way she isn’t meeting his eyes registers, but then she’s kissing him hard enough to push him back into the pillows. The strange fruit soda flavor of the lipstick hits just after, different from the faint taste of vanilla he’s used to kissing away when her mouth is glossy and pink. 

Jughead cups the back of her neck, under the wavy curls of her ponytail, and opens his mouth at the slow sweep of her tongue. Her hand settles on his chest, fingers spread wide. 

She gives a shuddery little moan deep in her throat. 

His body bypasses his brain like a blown circuit-breaker, so onboard with anything Betty might go for right now. He runs a hand up her side, over the thin cardigan, and tries not to think about how near he is to touching the curve of her breast. 

Her tongue pushes into his mouth as his hand slips back down to the inward dip of her waist. He rubs the flimsy edge of her sweater between his fingers instead of getting under her shirt to touch all that warm skin.

The heel of her palm drags across his chest, stopping off-center, like she can feel how hard his heart is pounding. She finds a way to kiss him, open-mouthed, while her tongue curls against his.

Then Betty pulls back. 

Jughead draws in a slow breath before opening his eyes. The lipstick is wrecked. He can’t decide if the smeared edges of bright color around her mouth look obscene or vulnerable or violent. 

And what’s wrong with him that he can’t tell which it is and he’s still so turned on by the image? 

Betty stares at his mouth and the realization clicks—the color must have transferred. Maybe he’s just as much a mess as she is. 

She reaches out with the hand that isn’t braced on the bed beside him. Her thumb drags under his lower lip, then out along his cheek, and with a jolt of confused arousal he gets that she is drawing the stain further over his skin. 

_I don't think red’s my color_ , sits on his tongue, because the intensity of all this is weird. But he thinks of the way Betty squared her shoulders earlier, the flash of something raw-edged behind her eyes, and he keeps quiet. Lets her touch him like this. Lets her stare.

Her eyes look dark, pupils blown wide in the dim room, as she rubs her lips together without looking away. She leans back in and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, then his cheek and near his chin. He imagines the red imprints. 

Betty whispers, “Is this ok?” between kisses and he is so intent on her mouth that he feels the individual puffs of breath with each syllable.

He has to swallow before he says, “Yeah,” and turns his face just enough to kiss her mouth again, open and messy but different, slower—half-formed kisses that bleed one into another. 

Her hand slides into his hair, tugging a little to angle his mouth how she wants him. And whatever she needs, he wants to give and give and give until she feels satisfied and safe and happy. He wants to push her pink cardigan off her shoulders, tug the elastic out of her tight ponytail, then pull her closer and find out what her hips feel like under his hands, how her legs fit around his waist. 

The impression is so vivid for a panicky moment he’s afraid that she somehow can feel how hard he is. He puts a hand against her shoulder as flashes of what he wants project onto the darkness behind his closed eyelids: her pale hair spread out over white sheets, her head tipped back as his teeth drag over her skin to make her shiver. The sounds he wants her to make because of _him_.

Without thinking, he gives a fumbling push against her shoulder and she breaks off the kiss. 

Her breath moves hot and fast over his cheek. 

Betty nudges her nose against him and leans back, not that far but his sense of scale is wonky because the distance stretches out and out. Her eyes are closed as she pulls in a long shaky breath and lets the air go like a sigh. She isn’t smiling, but she looks okay, less bunched up with tension despite her lurid red-smeared mouth and flushed cheeks.

She twists away, crossing to the mirrored vanity to grab a green packet that crinkles in her hand. 

Jughead sits up, swinging his feet onto the floor and shoving his hair back from his face. He focuses on the tiny white points of out-of-season lights, the shell-like lamp, the plush carpet and their discarded shoes. 

But he can’t help looking at Betty, too, in her light blue jeans with her bare feet and the neon orange polish.

She pulls out two wipes from the packet and gives him one, but won’t meet his eyes.

The damp wipe smells like cucumbers and leaves a sharp soap-like taste, but seems to get the lipstick off well enough judging by the abstract red marks on the cloth. 

Betty sits next to him on the bed and tugs the sleeves of her cardigan down over her the bottom halves of her palms. She bites her lip and, finally, glances up only to give a smile that’s unsteady around the edges but sticks.

“You have—” 

Betty starts to point at her own face but changes the gesture to reaching out for the stained wipe in his hand. Her fingertips rest on his chin and she wipes away a stray mark from beside his mouth and then brushes the pad of her thumb over his cheek. 

“There.” She lets her hands fall back into her lap.

His body is too wound up with the urge to get close her, however close she wants, and his scalp tingles from her hand fisting in his hair. He doesn’t know when he lost his beanie in all of this and feels a distant rumble of panic that he doesn’t even care. 

Pretty, put-together Betty Cooper hovered over him in her bed. She grabbed his hair and kissed him, intent and messy and—ok, yeah, _weird_ —but with that much want. 

For a moment, the delicate floral pattern on Betty’s cardigan seems like a strange kind of camouflage print for this particular suburban jungle. She blends right into the relentless pink-and-white of her bedroom. 

He doesn’t understand—why the lipstick, why she is ashamed and what put that raw flash of hurt in her eyes when she stared at herself in the mirror? 

Her room, the whole big empty house is so quiet he can hear how their breathing overlaps, still a little fast and shallow. 

Jughead can’t think of anything to say that isn’t too sharp humor or a tangle of questions, so he reaches out and takes her hand, threading their fingers together. 

Betty squeezes back, the same pressure as walks home from school and the few times they’ve held hands under a lunchroom table. 

She shifts on the edge of his vision. He feels her head come to rest against his shoulder and thinks, _maybe figuring out why isn’t the point_.

 

Later, when she kisses him goodbye at the front door of her parents' big white house, standing in the warm yellow-tinged light that spills out into the darkness, her lips are glossy pink and taste like floral, sugar-sweet vanilla.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [@burberrycanary](http://clktr4ck.com/qcg8)


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